I know I have been neglecting this blog for the past few weeks. One main reason is that about 2 weeks ago my main computer died. I’ve been chugging along for now with a machine that peaked during the heyday of Windows 98. It’s a 400MHz AMD K6-III machine with 320MB of RAM, so it works, if a little slowly. I certainly can’t multitask like I am used to though.

One day at work I even wrote up a long blog post on a piece of paper documenting my computer woes, but when I didn’t type it up that very day, it became outdated. In the end, I lost 2 hard drives, a motherboard, and a power supply. I think the power supply was the culprit in all of the problems. It took me quite a while to recover from the shock of losing over 200GB worth of data as well. Nothing original, just many years worth of collecting various bits of digital memorabilia.

The last of the new pieces arrived yesterday, so I will get to constructing soon enough.

One beneficial thing to come out of the trauma is that I started exploring some Linux distributions for use on my old machine. I’d been dual booting XP and Ubuntu for a while, but Ubuntu would tend to start running slowly. It got annoying. I’ve always noticed that Live CDs are quite zippy and started looking into some of them to use. I found an awesome one. Puppy Linux is a Live CD that loads itself completely into RAM and runs from there. It’s about a 60MB distro that only requires 128MB of system memory to function well. The aspect that really nudged me to try it out, though, is the multisession ability. Burn the ISO as a multisession disc and it will save your session back to the CD/DVD that you booted with, so that all the work you’ve done will be saved for next time. That has always been a drawback of Live CDs for me because I don’t have a USB stick, which some distros can save sessions to.

Puppy Linux seems really great. There are about 3 versions in the works right now. A standard 1.0.8 version, a community modified 1.0.9 version, and a 2.0 preview version. The community around Puppy Linux is extremely helpful and I’ve gotten great support from the forums. It’s really quite nice.

Right now I happen to be at a high school where the teacher had a PC that ran XP. I don’t know a quick way to get past a user’s password with XP in order just use the computer, so I tried the Live CD. Fortunately for me, the computer was set to check the optical drive upon boot and so I am running Puppy Linux right now.

technorati tags: puppylinux, linux